nLearning about the best practices to be followed in SEO is not enough as we should also be aware of the unethical spam techniques doing the rounds in the industry, so as to refrain from them while using SEO techniques. These spam techniques (also called Black Hat SEO techniques) are a set of unethical strategies which are employed to gain higher positions in search engine rankings. They are called Black Hat because they are considered to be plainly illegal by most of the search engines and among the SEO communities around the world.nThese techniques are employed to gain much faster results and actually work for a very short period of time. Many a websites have reached the top of SERPS (Search engine results pages) within as less as a couple of days of using these techniques. Any try to trick search engines such as Google, yahoo or ask will be considered as SEO spam and if detected by the search engines might result in banning of the sites from their respective indexes for a long period of time. And in these cases it is very difficult to get back on board if ever possible. It is very difficult to get re-indexed once caught using black hat SEO techniques and involves risking your website, domain name and the whole internet business.nFollowing are some of the techniques that must be avoided in On-Page Optimization:nKeyword Stuffing: this includes using a huge number of the most searched keywords in your content over and over again with not even a comma to separate them. These pages are usually useless, contains no helpful information and viewers are annoyed as well as shocked when they see the webpage. Search Engines now a day have complex algorithms to find out if the keywords are relevant to the content or just stuffed for ranking purpose and are penalizing those practicing this method.nMeta Tag Stuffing: this practice includes using repeated and irrelevant keywords in the Meta description of a website and using multiple title tags in HTML code purely for tricking purpose.nHidden Text or Invisible Text: once again the keywords are stuffed in the webpage but this time they trick the viewers as the color of the keywords will be same as that of background. So that it will be seen by the web crawlers (spiders) but will remain invisible to human beings. Other techniques recruited are using extremely tiny fonts, hiding the keywords in HTML codes (the likes of no frame sections or no script sections). This technique helped in gaining higher ranks but it does not works any more as the Search engines have become more intelligent now a days.nDoorway Pages: it is once again a thing that the end user will never see, it is a fake poor quality page created specifically to obtain higher ranks for particular keywords. Their only aim is to trick the Search Engines into ranking the page higher up in their indexes. They usually don’t have a navigation menu and only have a link to the main page and resides on mostly other company’s server.nWeb page Cloaking:  yet another tricking method, cloaking is used to deliver different results for search engines and readers. Here, webmasters would have configured their servers to recognize the IP addresses of the search engines spiders and give them content rich pages while providing end users with completely different content depending on their IP addresses and regions. It might also redirect users to a home page and is considered a spam.nMeta Refresh Tag: Meta refresh tag informs the browser to redirect to another webpage after a specific period of time. Now there are different kind of redirects according to the redirect time, if the time is 0 or 1 then it is termed as 301 permanent redirect and if the redirect time is 2 or more than 2 then it is considered 302 temporary redirect. Whichever the redirect, it is advisable from SE’s whereas meta refresh is a strict No-No.nLink farms: many a corporations have used this method, like other methods its sole purpose is also to gain link popularity. A link farm is usually a webpage that consists of a number of links (from 50 to 100+) to websites that have nothing related to the contents of the original site. They don’t gain popularity as it does not help the viewers in any respect. Now a day link farms are being treated a s spasm and getting deserving penalties.nCode Swapping: these are employed to gain rankings too but this time pages are optimized with genuine, relevant keywords and content and once the top spot is reached the webmaster swap the ranked page with another webpage.nMirror websites: these refer to the practice of having more than one domain containing the same content, design and keywords, which may and will create duplicate issues for the site in question.nSpamming a search engine is an unethical and a very bad idea and should not be practiced if your aim of succeeding in internet business is true at its core. If gaining higher ranks is one of your priorities, give your end users quality information, help them in any way possible make their experience on your site as enjoyable and informative as possible.

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